Thirteen O'Clock
by Ellynne
Summary: An AU with a different 13th Doctor. In the town of Storybrooke, where time is stopped and no one ever leaves, a man has vanished. The 13th Doctor's time is ticking down, but he and Sarah Jane mean to solve both mysteries, along with the reason the missing man, Mr. Gold, looks just like him.


I don't own Once Upon a Time or Doctor Who.

**Note: This story is now AU after The Time of the Doctor. The idea story grew out of reading reports that Robert Carlyle was once considered to play the Doctor. It's also sort of a tribute to Sarah Jane Smith and Elisabeth Sladen. I started it a while back. The ending is also finished. It was the middle I had trouble writing. So, I can't promise closure. But I thought posting it would help me deal with my current Rumplestiltskin withdrawal symptoms.**

A girl should have some standards.

Sarah Jane understood that intrinsically. She certainly understood it better than many of the young girls she saw these days (when, she asked herself, had she become a per- Manage Storiesson who could – and _would_ – use phrases like "young girls these days"?). She remembered when people were still shocked that a woman might be _serious_ about her education and her career. She'd been there in the early days when women had to fight to get into the professions they'd wanted – and, once in, had to fight to do the jobs they'd signed up for and not fetch coffee and sandwiches.

At the same time, you had to know where to draw the line. Some things were honest drudge work, the same awful jobs everyone low on the totem pole would be expected to get through. Refuse to do them, and you weren't paying your dues. They came with the territory.

Some didn't.

It was important to know the difference.

The same, general principles applied in private life, too. Know where you stood – and where you wanted to stand.

So, a girl needed standards, rules to serve as wake up calls, to tell her when she was getting too near the lines she didn't want crossed.

She'd never really been able to hold onto those lines with the Doctor.

He walked in and out of her life for years – once vanishing for the better part of two decades (two decades of her own time, centuries for him). She told herself again and again she was over him, she was moving on with her life.

And she did. In a way.

And, then, he showed up again.

Like today.

His face had changed (again). This time, he was a small, slight man with brown hair that hung to his shoulders and dark eyes. For some reason, he had picked up a Scottish accent – he'd tried to explain once how those shifts in speech worked, but she suspected it was one of those things that just didn't make sense to people who stayed in the same body all their lives.

And he'd decided to walk with a cane, affecting a small limp.

"Don't tell me you've finally managed a war wound," she said when she saw it. "I won't believe it."

He'd grinned at her – the same conspiratorial grin he always had right before they found themselves knee deep in trouble and running for their lives. He also twirled the cane and executed a tricky dance step just to show he didn't need it, then said, "Come and see. You won't believe what happened this time."

Famous last words.

But –

"Doctor, there's my son, Luke, and my daughter, Sky –" Her adopted, only slightly alien children – one of those stories that seemed to happen around the Doctor.

"Oh, no worries about that, Sarah. We'll be back in plenty of time. I have the Tardis, remember? A time machine?"

And, no matter how many times the Doctor wound up on the wrong side of the galaxy or in the wrong century, she still let arguments like that persuade her.

o0o0o0o

"The town of Storybrooke, Maine," the Doctor told her, now using the cane as they walked down the street. "A quiet, out of the way hamlet in a rather chilly state prone to large mosquito infestations. Also –"

A young woman with red streaks in her dark hair stopped in front of them, frozen like a deer in the headlights. "Mr. Gold, my grandmother has the rent money, it's just that –"

The Doctor turned cold and officious. "Yes, yes, dear, your grandmother can tell me whatever she needs to when I see her. But, right now, I have other business – _that I do not want interrupted_."

The young woman seemed to notice Sarah for the first time. "Of course, Mr. Gold, I'm sorry, I –"

"Yes, yes, have a good day – and tell your grandmother I'll be seeing her. Later."

The young woman scurried off.

The cold façade dropped, and the Doctor grinned like a school boy. "– a town where everybody seems to know me – even though I don't know them."

He led Sarah to a mansion sized house. "Mr. Gold's little cottage," he told her as they went up to it. "The richest, most merciless man in town, owns everything – and possibly everyone." He pulled out his sonic screwdriver and unlocked it.

Sarah gasped when she saw the inside. In her work as a journalist, she'd interviewed kings and queens (not all of them on this planet, thanks to the Doctor). She'd spoken to artists and people who ran some of the most famous museums in the world. There were several things here that, if they'd been real, could have had the Victoria and Albert Museum ready to fight to the death with the Louvre to get possession of them. Even imitations of this quality had to be worth a fortune.

"They aren't imitations," the Doctor said. "Everything you see here is real."

"What? That can't be possible. Doctor, that's a – that's a Leonardo sketch over there. And that figurine? It _has_ to be a copy. That's a lost piece of Michelangelo's. I recognize it from that time in Italy." She'd written an article on it, too, "Lost Treasures of the Renaissance." After all, if a reporter met Michelangelo, she should find some way to write about it, even if she had to leave out the personal quotes.

"It's real, and so is the Mona Lisa in the guest bedroom upstairs – not that that's so shocking. He made several. It was an alien who'd commissioned them, though I'd thought most of them had been destroyed when he failed to destroy the Earth – the alien, not Leonardo – the paintings were part of the plan – not to worry, they're perfectly safe, now. You're welcome to use the guest room, if you'd like. Or one of the others if you don't like the painting. It would give me the creeps, trying to sleep with someone like that looking down at me, that strange smile on her face –"

"And what's this Mr. Gold going to say when he comes home and finds me in his guest room?"

"Nothing at all. That's the point. He's gone missing."

"And . . . ?"

"And?" he said. "Why does there need to be more? A missing man, a mystery to uncover –"

"A man who looks like you but who lives in a corner of this planet you could have overlooked for centuries, a man who has sketches by da Vinci and statues by Michelangelo in his parlor."

That eager, schoolboy grin was back. "I know! Isn't it _marvelous?_ And there's more. Upstairs, in the reading room, there are books and scrolls from the library of Alexandria. And some of the other things here –"

"Yes, Doctor, I'm sure it's all wonderful. But what does it mean? Or –" she added quickly before he could give her a lecture on voicing conclusions before you had all the facts, "– what do _you_ think it means?"

"Ah. Well." The Doctor plopped down in an antique winged chair. "On the face of it, the evidence suggests something very unlikely. Alexandrian manuscripts? You don't just find those lying around – they're the real thing. I saw my notes scribbled in the margin. A good share of the treasures here, like the extra Mona Lisa, were all believed lost or destroyed ages ago. The logical conclusion is that Mr. Gold has some way of getting hold of them right before they were destroyed."

"A time traveler?" Sarah said. "A time traveler who looks like you?"

"Interesting, isn't it? Especially since he's nothing like me. And he only has one heart, if the files I filched from the local hospital are to be believed – he had his last physical just before he went missing. And, then, there's this town."

Sarah glanced at the window, not that she could see anything. The burgundy curtains were pulled aside but only to reveal gauzy, white curtains beneath. "What about this town?"

"Well, first, the fact that it shouldn't exist here. Always interesting when that happens, don't you think? And, second, although the town _does_ exist, time doesn't, not in its borders – which, by the way, no one belonging to the town can leave. Yet, Mr. Gold isn't here. A bit odd, wouldn't you say?"

"That depends. Are you going to explain what you just said?"

"Sarah –"

"I promise to applaud how clever you are once you've done it. I just don't want to wait till something's trying to eat me before you explain that's what you were hinting about hours earlier. "

"You're taking all the fun out of this."

"Sorry, Doctor. I seem to be turning into a cranky, old woman with no patience whatsoever. Now, could you explain?"

"Oh, all right. The town of Storybrooke, Maine is listed on all the maps and histories it should be. It has its own little Wikipedia entry and everything. There's a map at the Historical Society of Maine from the Revolutionary War showing local skirmishes fought around it. You'll find it properly written up along with other settlements in original documents from when the people of Maine were having to prove their land claims in Massachusetts' courts. Any record you can check from any period shows exactly what you would expect to find to prove the town and its people were exactly where they were supposed to be doing exactly what they should have been doing. No historian in his right mind would question it.

"Of course, none of those historians have a time machine.

"This town didn't exist twenty-eight years ago. As near as I can tell, it–and its history–just blossomed into being one night and it's been here ever since.

"And that history keeps updating itself. If you were able to go and check the federal tax records for the people here the day they were actually first filed in 1984 – I'm not sure what George Orwell knew about it, but that is the year the townspeople first filed them – they're all the same ages as they are in 2012. But, if you checked those same documents from 1984 in 2012, you'd find they'd somehow changed since they were first filed, different names, where necessary, and different dates of birth."

"Aliens?" Sarah guessed.

"If they are, they've worked a bit harder at it than most to blend in. They're all human, right down to their DNA.

"Or the ones I checked were. I'm not sure about some of the others.

"Besides, whatever convinced this world they'd always been here seems to have convinced them, too. No one in this town has changed. There's a young woman who works at the local diner who has been within two weeks of giving birth for nearly three decades. As far as I can tell, with minor variations, they relive the same year over and over again. There hasn't been a birth or a death here in all that time.

"Also, _no one_ has moved out of the town – or even left it – since it appeared. And no one moves in. I cheated a bit to get here. I moved the Tardis to where the town would be twenty-nine years ago, then I moved it forward. If I'd tried a more direct route, I would have just found myself in the Antares Nebula or maybe Portland. Nowhere interesting, at any rate.

"When people _do_ try to leave, bad things happen. I've been able to verify another young woman – the one we met on the way here – who put a down payment on an apartment in Boston. She had to cancel when her grandmother had a heart attack. A teen, who had a sports scholarship to college, had an accident and had to have leg surgery instead. A man who's been working on a boat to sail around the world suffers hull breeches with clockwork regularity.

"Interestingly enough, there's also a record of a man who left his wife five years ago and hasn't been seen since – but he was on record as having left her five years ago when the town first appeared and has been missing for five years ever since, so I'm not sure we can count him. Although, there's also been a John Doe listed as in a coma for five years in the hospital for twenty-eight years, so there may be a blatantly obvious connection – which no one here has noticed.

"At any rate, since we snuck in here and may be under the same rules, try not to go outside the town borders unless you really have to.

"Although there has been an exception to the no-one-comes-here rules – besides us, I mean. It seems the mayor, one Regina Mills, adopted a boy from outside the town ten years ago. He's the only person who's been aging normally since then. A good thing, too. Can you imagine ten years in nappies?"

Sarah filed the information away but didn't comment – no point in encouraging him in side issues. "So, this Mr. Gold looks like you and is part of a town that has been manipulated in time – something only a time traveler could see through. Is he a time traveler? Is he a Time Lord? There aren't many of your lot lying around these days."

"No," the Doctor said soberly. "There aren't."

"In fact, the only one I can think of – and you know he'd get a kick out of looking like you – would be the Master."

"Yes, there's him. And it almost fits. Except . . . this Mr. Gold really doesn't seem like him. By all reports, he's rather ruthless in collecting rents – he owns most of the town – but he's not really homicidal or power crazy. If the Master were here, I'd expect him to be running things. But, the person in charge is Mayor Mills – Gold's not even a power behind the throne. Nor is he dating her or seeing her on the sly – that's the sheriff's job. It's completely her show.

"Besides," he looked around the parlor. "The interior design here just isn't the Master's style."

"A king's ransom in treasures isn't his style?"

"A king's ransom in treasures he _never shows anyone_ isn't his style. It's one of his immature quirks. He can't just _do_ something, he has to make sure there's an audience to appreciate it."

_Said the pot to the kettle, _Sarah thought.

The Doctor went on. "He's never really cared about Earth art you know. The only point in having things like this would be to make sure everybody else knows.

"No, you and I need to go into town and see what we can find out. Or, rather, _you_ need to find out. People won't talk to me. As far as they know, I'm Mr. Gold, and you've already seen how conversations with him don't get far beyond, 'I already paid the rent!' And that's only the people who haven't already run the other way when they see me coming."

"Oh. But, if no one ever visits, how do I explain being here?"

"Well, I might have exaggerated when I said _no one_ visits. They get mail and delivery trucks, things like that. I think people have even been known to stop for gas and directions – although there's a diner just outside of town that's a much better place to stop for either. _You_ are here because you are a journalist I contacted about some antiquities I was researching – as you said yourself, you've written some interesting articles on lost antiquities. Mr. Gold does have unusual and extensive contacts. Between one thing and another, I decided it would be easier to get the job done if I had _you_ on site for a few days.

"Which reminds me, make sure to tell people I coerced you and that you'll be overjoyed if you never have to deal with me again when this is over – unless it involves sticking sharp objects in sensitive parts of my anatomy. Although, go easy on anything like that. I have a feeling the local sheriff might overreact if he hears someone making threats. The man has almost nothing to do except drive around and lock up the town drunk. Besides visiting the mayor, I mean."

Which was how Sarah wound up at the local diner, Granny's.

o0o0o0o

The doctor went to Gold's shop.

Pawn shops were supposed to have a seedier, desperate feeling to them, he thought. The debris of desperate souls, sold for drink or a last ditch effort to keep food on the table. They had stolen goods or the bits of junk no one else would take.

Or, sometimes, just that old camera you didn't need now you had the new model and why should you just throw the thing away?

But, they didn't feel like Aladdin's cave, a magic place of wondrous treasures – whose owners would pay a pretty penny to get them back if they only knew where to look.

Yes, he thought, that was the difference between this and a normal pawn shop. Pawn shops were full of things that had been sold; this shop was full of things waiting to be bought – or reclaimed.

Many of them were beautiful. Some were strangely terrifying—what was it about that leather ball that disturbed him so? All of them begged to be studied and wondered at.

He looked over the paintings covering one wall. No portraits. They were all landscapes. The Doctor frowned. He'd seen a great deal of Earth – and several other worlds. He didn't recognize any of the places shown here . . . .

Fine china, musical instruments, boats and bicycles, some of the creepiest puppets he had ever seen – who had carved them like that? Their faces frozen in terror? Those should have been ugly. Yet, even those seemed more wondrous than horrible.

He found a chess set of gold, like the one the surviving Aesir were supposed to find after Ragnarok, the destruction of the world. The old playthings of the gods, proof of the past they had forgotten, that they would study in wonder . . . .

He was looking at them, he realized, studying them in wonder.

But, it was a mobile of glass unicorns made for a child's crib and the leather ball that captured his attention. He wasn't sure why.

The humans in this time and place were overly protective, he sometimes thought, afraid to let children face the slightest risks – of course, the Doctor's people had thought nothing of tossing their children in front of the time vortex and seeing who walked away sane and who didn't, so perhaps he shouldn't judge – but a _glass_ mobile – for an infant – it didn't really fit this land.

Neither did the ball.

It was a kind that hadn't been made for decades, leather hand cut and hand stitched. It had a feeling of great age, too, he thought. Not something a human would be likely to sense. It wasn't old or cracked – in fact, if he went by its looks, it might have been made only a few months ago. A young boy could have been kicking it down a dirt street just yesterday.

But, he was a Time Lord. He felt the age on it.

It had been made centuries ago.

He thought of his granddaughter, Susan, another face lost in the folds of time. An elfin child with dark hair and dark eyes . . . .

Her features twisted in his memory as he held the ball, became the earnest face of a young boy.

He remembered hearing Susan speaking of their homeworld, of Gallifrey, to one of the companions who had traveled with them. The beautiful world that was lost to them. But someday, Susan had said, someday they would return . . . .

Susan had never seen that day. He remembered taking her and fleeing before her own coming of age before the vortex. It was like an Ogre, he thought, devouring the children the Time Lords sent to it – or, worse, returning them broken and shattered, like the veterans of a terrible war, crippling them, the childhood burned from their eyes.

He could not sacrifice Susan to that.

And, if saving her meant breaking all the laws of his people or being willing to take them all on like some mad hero out of a storybook, fighting armed soldiers with nothing but a knife in his hand, that was what he would do.

A metaphorical knife.

Not that he was sure what it was a metaphor for. He seemed to have gotten a little tangled up in that one.

Although armed soldiers who had him outnumbered and surrounded seemed to pretty much summarize most of his dealings with his people.

And most other people, come to think of it.

Never mind. The only way to protect Susan had been leaving their world for another – any other, no matter how dangerous – and it wasn't as if he would ever have let her go alone.

The image of the boy rose up again, a boy so like Susan, dark hair and eyes, fair skin, falling through the vortex, screaming out to him as he let the child go.

All right, there was something seriously disturbing about this place.

The bell on the door rang as a customer came in.

No, not a customer. It was the smiling, serpentine mayor.

Really serpentine. He'd known carnivorous reptiles that ate their own young who were absolutely cuddly compared to her.

"Mr. Gold, you opened up a little late today."

Not much for small talk, was she? "It is my shop, dear. I can keep the hours I like. Besides, I had a little business to conduct elsewhere."

"Oh, yes, that charming friend of yours. Who is she, Mr. Gold? We so rarely seem to get visitors to our town."

"Her name's Sarah Jane Smith. She's a journalist. I'd read some articles of hers on antiquities and thought she might be able to help me with some research on items I've collected. Unfortunately, there's only so much you can do electronically, even these days. I had to force her to come to make the examinations." He let some of the venom he was feeling for Regina spill over as he spoke of Sarah, as if she were a loathsome annoyance who had taken far more of his time than she deserved.

Regina was relaxing slightly. Yes, he'd thought this story would reassure her. A stranger coming to Storybrooke on her own was one thing, a stranger coerced by Mr. Gold was another.

"'_Force _her to come'?" Regina repeated. "You make it sound like you held a gun to the poor woman's head."

The image flooded his mind. Holding a gun, holding it to Regina's head, and –

The Doctor pushed it away, trying to school his features to what he thought Mr. Gold would do. He flashed a wolfish grin. "Let's just say she took some convincing."

"It doesn't sound like there's much love lost between you."

That stung. Anger welled up in him, fierce and protective – and, with it, the knowledge that Regina _must not_ be allowed to think Sarah could be used against him.

And that he wanted to kill Regina, wanted to kill her as much as he had ever wanted to save someone in his life –

_No, focus on Sarah. Protect her._

He snorted derisively. "That old stick?" he said, hoping Sarah would never know what he was saying – or that she would understand if she did. "I may not be as young as I used to be, Regina, but she's old enough to be my mother – and about as demanding, too. She's one of those relics who think a little intelligence and some specialized training makes her indispensable. I'm sure you'd get along wonderfully. The sooner she finishes her job the better."

There was a little disappointment in Regina's eyes – she _had_ wanted something to use against him – but the remaining tension had bled away. Sarah Jane's presence was an oddity, but Regina was convinced it was a trivial one instead of a threat. "Where's she staying?"

"Unfortunately, I offered her the guest room at my house when I hired her. It's too late to make other arrangements today, but I mean to convince her Mrs. Lucas' bed and breakfast will suit her better tomorrow."

"I see. Will she be in town long then?"

"A couple of days, I think. Maybe three. Any longer, and I'll know she's just trying to pad my bill."

He sent her on her way, relieved to have gotten through without arousing any suspicions.

And there would have been suspicions, he thought.

Regina knew.

Exactly _what_ she knew, he didn't know – but she knew it. She knew enough to recognize when the rules around Storybrooke seemed to be breaking – and came swooping in like a bad tempered dragon defending her hoard to protect them.

Pity he didn't know what she was protecting.

But . . . he knew what he had felt.

Gold's anger – Gold's _loathing_ for the woman he had spoken to, a woman _he_ had never met before.

o0o0o0o

Granny, it turned out, was the grandmother the young woman with the red hair streaks had mentioned. The young woman, whose name was Ruby, worked there as a waitress. She wore next to nothing, put on makeup with a trowel, and flirted outrageously with every man in the place, except for Dr. Whale.

Sarah, who was trying to get a feel for the community, found it odd at first. Girls who radiated cheap and easy didn't normally give the cold shoulder to doctors—the medical kind, not Time Lord sort—without reason – and Dr. Whale really was a doctor as well as being one of the directors of the local hospital, nor did Ruby to have any history with him or other reason to dislike him.

But, after a little observation, Sarah thought she understood. Ruby flirted with the men (who all left generous tips) but she managed to laugh and put off any requests for more _personal_ dealings – except when her grandmother was listening. When that happened, Ruby's flirting went into overdrive and there was nothing a man could suggest that she wouldn't at least listen to.

Except Dr. Whale, who (Sarah guessed) was a bit more serious about it than the other men Ruby teased and joked with – or who wouldn't know to back off gracefully if Ruby changed her mind.

Ruby might be a flirt, but it looked like her real interest was in rebelling against Grandma.

But, even if everything she did to rein in her granddaughter was only making things worse, Sarah had a few guesses why Granny acted the way she did. Ruby's mother was dead, and there was no mention of a father. That was probably enough to turn any grandmother into an overly strict control freak who didn't know when to let go.

Assuming Granny and Ruby weren't invading aliens and all this wasn't just a cover before they lured travelers into the back and cooked them for dinner.

It wasn't like Sarah hadn't dealt with that before.

She ordered a salad.

"So," Ruby said, bringing out the food. "You know Gold?"

"Unfortunately," Sarah said. She tried to look nervous. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. He's one of your neighbors, isn't he? I'm just finding him a bit difficult to work with."

"Don't worry. There's nothing you can say about Gold that everyone else hasn't said before you. You're working for him?"

Sarah nodded. "I'm a journalist. I did a few articles on antiquities Mr. Gold read and he thought I could help him with some research on pieces he'd collected."

"A journalist?" Ruby's eyes glowed. "You travel a lot?"

Ruby began to pump Sarah for the places she'd seen, London, Paris, Boston – Ruby spoke of Boston in the hushed, reverent tones of a pilgrim searching for the Promised Land. Sarah was careful, of course, only to mention places on Earth and tried to stick with ones she'd seen in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries.

Though she did find herself mentioning the village her Aunt Lavinia had lived in. "Amazing place," Sarah said, thinking of the witch coven that had attacked her there. "People in small towns have so many secrets outsiders never suspect."

Ruby laughed. "Secrets nobody cares about. Trust me, I know everything that happens in Storybrooke, and none of it's worth knowing."

"Everything?" Sarah asked. "Any dirt on Mr. Gold?"

"Oh, Mr. Gold doesn't have any secrets. He's a mean, old, skinflint and he doesn't care who knows it. No, I take it back. Nobody knows where the bodies are buried but we all know there must be some. We also don't know how he manages to keep walking around when it's clear he ripped his heart out and hocked it years ago."

"What's this about bodies and hearts?" a man with a lilting, Irish brogue said, sitting down at the counter by Sarah. He was a young, bearded man – and he wore the sheriff's badge.

Odd, Sarah thought. There were plenty of Irish immigrants to America – and had been for hundreds of years. But, they didn't usually wind up in small towns somewhere in the backwoods of New England.

And the few sheriffs she'd met had all been older. Much older.

"We're just discussing Mr. Gold," Ruby said. "Ms. Smith, this is Sheriff Graham. Graham, this is Ms. Smith. Be nice to her. She's already had to put up with Gold all day and she may not be able to take much more."

"Hard day?" Graham asked.

"A little," Sarah said. "I'm helping Mr. Gold with some research. He's rather exacting."

"Sounds like him. You're from England, by the sound of it. Did he drag you all the way over from there?"

Sarah shook her head. "I'm a journalist. I was covering a story in Boston when Mr. Gold contacted me. He was very insistent that I come up here to help him. And what about you, where are you from?"

"Ireland originally, but I tend to think of Storybrooke as home."

"What brought you here?"

He shrugged. "The city never really worked for me. I had a girlfriend who used to say I was raised by wolves. I wanted to live in a small town – and Storybrooke gets to you after a while."

They chatted a bit more.

But, though, Sarah asked various questions, and Sheriff Graham seemed to answer them all honestly and frankly, she never found out what city he'd lived in or any other reasons why he'd left – or why Storybrooke was the place he'd chosen even before it "got" to him.

She sized up several of the other locals. Looking for aliens, she found herself looking for physical oddities.

There were a few men who were all short and very stocky, powerfully built.

Perhaps even more oddly, although the general resemblance made her wonder if they were related, they had nothing to do with each other.

One was another doctor from the hospital (and how many doctors did a town this size really need? How did a town where no one changed and no one died even manage to keep a hospital running?). She heard him talk briefly to Dr. Whale. Another ran a small store down the street and had a bad case of hay fever. The third was the town drunk, a man named Leroy. He must be the one the sheriff kept locking up. He was a cranky, grumpy man who managed to insult three people for no reason before stomping out. He didn't leave a tip.

She also saw some of the nuns. They had a convent nearby, she was told. But –

Sarah found herself staring.

All the nuns she saw were about the same age.

All young.

All pretty.

Not typical nuns at all. The median age was getting older and older. Even if they were inclined to join, young women tended to take a look around the world first.

They had modern, modified habits – conservative and uniform, but without the wimples or long dresses that had typified nuns before reforms began back in the sixties.

She wasn't familiar with the order, the Order of St. Melissa, and, somehow, nobody even seemed certain if they were Catholic or Orthodox or Church of England or what.

She went back and told the Doctor what she'd learned – or hadn't learned.

"St. Melissa," he mused. "I don't remember that one. Of course, it might make sense if they were fairies instead of nuns."

"If they were what?"

"That was just a quip," he said quickly. "Not serious. But, if you'd ever read _Orlando Furiouso _–wonderful book from the sixteenth century, I had the author autograph my copy – Melissa was a sort of prototype fairy godmother. And the name does mean honey bee, which would fit."

"They were nuns, Doctor. There were no wings or magic wands in sight."

"No, no, of course not. And you saw three, stocky men, the grumpy one, the sneezy one, and the doctor one. I don't suppose you noticed if there were any others?"

Sarah gave him a severe look. "No, Doctor, no one bashful, or sleepy, or dopey, or happy."

"Really? No one happy? In the whole town? That does present a problem."

"Doctor . . . ."

"Yes, yes, sorry. I'll try to be a bit more serious. Regina came by and questioned me, by the way. Wanted to know who you were and why you were here. I think that woman knows more about what's going on around here than she lets on."

o0o0o0o


End file.
